Salt Water
by Margarita
Summary: Isabel's thoughts during "Departure."


She never cried ****

Salt Water

Author: Margarita

Email: margarita782@hotmail.com

Category: Isabel angst

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Sadly, nothing Roswell-related belongs to me, including the characters.

Spoilers: "Surprise," "Cry Your Name," "Departure."

Summary: Isabel's thoughts during "Departure."

Author's Note: This was just begging to be written; I'm actually surprised someone didn't beat me to it. Please review! Thanks!

She never cried – ever. Bawling somehow just didn't fit into her whole "Ice Princess" image. But lately, it seemed as if all she had done was cry. There had been Alex's death, which still did awful things to her stomach when she thought about it, and the drawn-out fight with Max that had been incredibly rare for them, since they never fought. And now... Well, now they were leaving, and she would never get to tell her parents exactly how much they meant to her or how much she thought of them. She'd never explain the way she would miss this, being at dinner, her father asking for Chinese mustard that she was pretty sure her mother hid from him because of the heartburn it gave him. And it hurt, to know that she couldn't just tell them whom she was. She knew that Max was wrong, that her parents would accept them, that they could be allies like no other people they knew. Max was too cautious, too afraid, so untrusting of the people that had cared for them as if they were their children by blood and not adoption.

So Isabel cried. She cried to the point where her stomach ached and her head throbbed and she knew that if she could just go to sleep all of this would be a dream. Alex would be alive, waiting for her at the Crashdown, there would be no Granalith and no spaceship home, and she could pretend for a little while longer that she cared about the planet she came from more than the planet Earth like she was supposed to. But they were leaving in two hours and Max would be home soon with encouraging, inspiring, and commanding words and she would have to leave. And she didn't want to, that's the thing. She wanted to stay on Earth and have girl talks and paint her nails and draw Alex's name on her notebooks with little hearts around it. But she couldn't. She couldn't do any of that because she was different. She was an alien. She had a destiny. And she couldn't escape that, no matter how hard she tried. And she missed being normal, wished that she had something else to worry about besides never seeing her home again.

And so, for lack of anything else to do to pass the time, Isabel cried. The tears were slow at first, large broken sobs tumbling from her throat, but soon they quickened, fell faster. She was sobbing, bawling, and feeling, for the first time in her life, all of the emotions she had so effectively pushed away. She cried for her parents and the fact that they would never truly know who she was. She cried because her mother would never see her get married and her father would never walk her down the aisle. She cried for Congresswoman Whitaker and the innocence she had lost when she killed her. She cried for Grant and what knowing her had done to him. She cried for Maria and Liz and Kyle, who would most likely never see them again. She cried for Alex, and his lost life, and the love that she had never gotten to express to him. She cried and felt, and it became too much, too much, and she could hardly breathe. She pressed her hands to her stomach and her chest, and then she looked up and there was Max. He was speaking, but she couldn't hear the words, could only hear her thoughts, could only feel her head pounding, could only feel the urge to scream until his words finally broke through the haze inside her. "You are my home."

And then they made a movie for their parents, and she tried not to cry as they said goodbye to the past eighteen years, dismissing it with nothing more than words, which would mean so much less to her parents than she wanted them to. And she thought bitterly of her mother who would play the tape again and again when they were discovered missing, as if it could bring them back, as if they were only on a trip somewhere and would return with souvenirs and photos of everywhere they had been. Isabel knew that she would watch it until the tape was too worn to play, until the words were nothing more than words and sorrow filled her mother when she saw other teenagers passing the house.

Before she knew what was happening, Max was leading her out of her room, and it was time to leave.

And suddenly, no tears would come.


End file.
